As a writer, what do you feel your greatest strengths and weaknesses are?

[Anonjohn20]

Strengths:
Dialogue.
Making good characters (at least in my opinion, LOL).
External conflicts.

Weaknesses:
Scene transitions (I expose myself here as an amateur).
Action scenes.
Managing subplots (I make too many).
Internal conflicts.
Conclusions (unfortunately it's one of the most important parts of writing).

 

[MajorKerina]

Character internal monologues are my greatest strength and my greatest weakness is when I let them go on too long without focus.

 

[Axiweave]

I feel like my greatest weakness is my mechanical skill in writing.

Making the story is one thing but constantly having to proofread to see if things make sense for the reader, and check for grammar is something else.

 

[foxes]

My strengths - I think I can write. Weaknesses - no, I can't.

 

[Edenc2708]

my strength is to daze around aimlessly, as my weakness is lazy

 

[Zagaroth]

My greatest strength is easily making characters who develop very real feeling personalities. Naturally, with all writing, there is a limit to how deep and complex a character can be, but I think mine at least approach the limit of what you are going to find without doing a 1st person slice of life.

My weakness would be writing stories with a looming threat or deadline that is present from the beginning and always driving the characters forward. Which is why I usually don't write those. I *like* writing stories focused on characters who are moving toward things they want, and then dealing with the bad things they discover along the way toward their goals. Though I do have one brewing in which a character is given a slightly vague 'mission from god', but she's still going to have plenty of time to start developing herself and her abilities while she does her investigation and figures out what is going on.

In a more general sense, my weakness is a consistency of a writing schedule, especially when other stressors are added. That's why I only post 2 chapters a week. Oh, there's other things that could be improved upon, but this feels like my biggest overall weakness.

 

[GwynLordofTinder]

Dialogue is my strength, easy. I just have a knack for writing the way people actually speak.

Weakness has to be villians. Mostly due to the fact I don't agree with Heroes that follow no-kill rules, so it's tough to have baddies survive multiple encounters.

 

[l8rose]

Strength: World-building and researching. I love explaining how things work for my stories. I've come up with an obscene amount of information for various stories. A lot of it never makes it into any of the stories but it's all there in the background. Waiting.

Weakness: Following through to a "goal" the way I intended. I don't plan out every iota of how a story will play out. Just "goals" of key points in the story. About 80% of the time, things get derailed and the story has gone off in a direction that I'm not sure about (or even want). I have so many versions of various stories (Lyrium Blue has about 15 different versions before I started completely rewriting it).

 

[Eldoria]

greatest strength: the story's symbolic, philosophical, and humane moral. greatest weakness: the story is too sensitive in touching on the darkness of the real world.

Dialogue is my strength, easy. I just have a knack for writing the way people actually speak.

Weakness has to be villians. Mostly due to the fact I don't agree with Heroes that follow no-kill rules, so it's tough to have baddies survive multiple encounters.

Well, you don't have to kill the villain. You can make him an ideological rival to the protagonist, where the villain threatens not because of his crimes but because his ideas are too dangerous for the world.

 

[LiteraryWho]

I've been told my narrative voice is good, so I'll take that as a strength, and I think I'll say finishing stories is one too. Not to say I don't have lots of unfinished projects (I call them story ideas, please and thank you, and I won't hear any complaints about any supposed "novella worth of notes"), but I do have three novels finished.

My most obvious (to me) weakness is self promoting, and in writing, right now I'm working on making deliberate character arcs, so I'll call that a weakness too. Also, tbh, I don't really enjoy the writing part of writing, so it goes really slowly, and I'm lucky to beat five hundred words a day.

Dialogue is my strength, easy. I just have a knack for writing the way people actually speak.

Weakness has to be villians. Mostly due to the fact I don't agree with Heroes that follow no-kill rules, so it's tough to have baddies survive multiple encounters.

You might have fun trying to write a story focusing more on "antagonism" rather than villainy, e.g. a character drama.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Strength is probably dealing with the lighter moments of the story.
Weakness is probably constant levels of description. That or just being consistent with writing.

 

[LeilaniOtter]

Strengths:
Storytelling, pacing, characters, dialogue, world-building, sexual situations/romance

Weakness:
Finishing the project, knowing when enough is enough, trying too hard to add descriptions, missing Oxford commas, sometimes notoriously long sentences that Grammarly likes to chop into two.

*glares at Grammarly*

 

[BearlyAlive]

Stronks: I'm fairly eloquent, and if not funny at least between deadpan pun and dad joke territory. I'm also adept enough to avoid worlbuilding mistakes and power creep.

Weakness: I pro-crastinate at the highest level, like "goldfish with ADHD" levels of mental interference.

 

[kosamsel]

Aside from the technical stuff (grammar, spelling, etc.), my main strengths are detail, dialogue, and humor. I'm also good at world building in a way that feels more grounded in reality. This means I try to make every character and location unique since I don't leave a lot of room for speculation.

I originally thought pacing was my weakness, but it's actually perfectionism. I like my chapters to be very long which makes editing very long as well. I thought my pacing was slow, but it's actually because I'm too preoccupied with fine details to churn out new material. The long chapters are another weakness since that seems to turn off a lot of people.

If anyone has tips to get over that, please let me know. It's worse than writer's block.

Ahh, I totally know the feeling, I used to have that problem as well! I’d get so stuck on endlessly re-working chapters that not only would I never publish anything, I’d depress myself into not writing at all because I could never meet my own standards.

I don’t know if this will be useful to you, but what worked for me was setting strict self-imposed deadlines for how long I could edit a chapter. It… wasn’t very effective when I was only writing for myself haha, but writing for an audience, however small, gives me the pressure I need to stop caring so much about perfection and start caring more about *done*. Plus, having a regular upload schedule definitely helps with attracting new readers!

My greatest strength is definitely my action scenes. People have told me they're so well described, it's like reading a comic without pictures.

My biggest weakness is probably exposition. I do my best to weave it naturally into the story itself, but I usually end up just taking a paragraph or two to info dump on the reader anyway.

LOL, I’m guilty of that too… I try to gussy it up, but like, there are undeniably some FAT info dumps in all of my stories

strength: I'm focused enough to work on the same project for multiple years.

Weakness: I'm so slow it's as if I've only been working on it for a few weeks.

FELT THAT

Strength: World-building and researching. I love explaining how things work for my stories. I've come up with an obscene amount of information for various stories. A lot of it never makes it into any of the stories but it's all there in the background. Waiting.

Weakness: Following through to a "goal" the way I intended. I don't plan out every iota of how a story will play out. Just "goals" of key points in the story. About 80% of the time, things get derailed and the story has gone off in a direction that I'm not sure about (or even want). I have so many versions of various stories (Lyrium Blue has about 15 different versions before I started completely rewriting it).

Oh my god I have ABSOLUTELY been there; I can’t even tell you how many reiterations of my stories I’ve come up with over the years

 

[Clo]

Going off the feedback I receive and my own very critical self-perception:

Strengths:
-Characterisation and fully developped internal worlds,
-Clean, simple writing style,
-Romantic and slice-of-life scenes.

Weaknesses:
-Wordy,
-Glacial pace,
-Refusal to time skip/tell, choosing instead of show every mundane detail.

 

[kosamsel]

Going off the feedback I receive and my own very critical self-perception:

Strengths:
-Characterisation and fully developped internal worlds,
-Clean, simple writing style,
-Romantic and slice-of-life scenes.

Weaknesses:
-Wordy,
-Glacial pace,
-Refusal to time skip/tell, choosing instead of show every mundane detail.

LOL, we’re in the same boat; those are my weaknesses too

 

[AnEmberOfSundown]

Strengths:
-Dialogue
-Humor
-Pacing

Weaknesses:
-Dialogue tags (It makes sense in my head, I swear!)
-Analysis paralysis
-Correct use/spelling of certain common words

I still have to recite Strongbad's song about "its" vs. "it's" in my head every time.
(Oh if you want it to be possessive it's just I-T-S. But if it's supposed to be a contraction, then it's I-T-apostrophe-S. Scalawag.)

 

[ElijahRyne]

You can tackle this question however you like—maybe 3 things you like about your own writing and 3 things you don’t, or what’s easiest for you to write versus what’s the most difficult, etc etc. Maybe you love world-building but struggle with pacing, or you think your dialogue is really strong but your action sequences could use some work. Whatever comes to mind.

Don’t just focus on the negatives! Hype yourself up too!
To answer my own question:

My Public Enemy Number One has always been pacing. I am… maybe the worst at it I’ve ever seen LOL. It takes me ages to get to the point, both from an overarching narrative perspective and on a scene-to-scene basis. I just get lost, man. I LOVE a bit of navel-gazing ?

I think my greatest strength is… prooobably characterization, although I’m not always happy with how I translate a character from my head to the page.

My greatest strength is the meticulous planning and analysis of my writing/storytelling.
My greatest weakness is my motivation and the amount of effort I am willing to put in.